Overclocking the Intel X6800 with Liquid Nitrogen (LN2)

Using Liquid Nitrogen to control the CPU temperature to gain impressive increases in performances from the highest rated Intel Core 2 CPU. In this article the members of OCTB reach for a new high by chilling an X6800 well below zero.

Test Setup and Isolation

As always, safety goes first with any undertaking like this, we don’t want to kill our hardware during the session, so we insulate the motherboard properly, much like we did here when working with Dry Ice.

We used closed cell foam (from and old PSU packaging), Vaseline and sealstring in and around the CPU socket area:

The hardware used for this OC project:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 Retail

Abit AB9 S775 Motherboard

OCZ Flexline PC9200 DDR2 Memory

NVIDIA 6200LE

OCZ 600W GamerXstream

One 80GB Maxtor HDD

The operating system in was Windows 2003 Server SP2, mainly because we got lower SuperPi times compared to the XP OS.

With the necessary fans in place the container was installed and ready for usage, and overview of the test setup:

We fill our trusty thermos bottle with fresh LN2 and get ready for the first benchmark session ->